An Alien of Extraordinary Ability

By now everyone has seen (and blogged) about the latest Lady Gaga video which appropriates bits n' pieces from film history and lesbian pulp fiction. In the video there is an extended kiss between the Lady G and a butch-y female prison inmate - her name is Heather Cassils.

I tend to agree with the LGBT Blogging panel at SXSW and the folks over at Queerty that focusing on celebrity personalities may bring in more readers but ultimately gives those readers a skewed notion of what queerness looks like on the ground. And so this post is dedicated not to Gaga but to Cassils, a relatively unknown but provocative performance artist who continuously questions gender and body modification.

Originally from Montreal, Cassils moved to Hollywood to get her Master's of Fine Arts from CalArts. Since that time she has built a small but conceptually strong body of work. So much so that Casills has been deemed an "Alien of Extraordinary Ability" and so is allowed to remain in the United States. She is not only an artist, but also a working stunt person and competitive body builder. It is these three occupations (each with their own presupposed ideas re: gender and sexuality) that define the structures of her performance-based works.

In Tiresius for example, Casills stands inside a block of ice sculpted into the form of a Grecian male torso, and melts the ice with her body heat over the duration of five hours. While the work is a nod to Marina Abramovic's Lips of Thomas, Casills comments more on trans bodies here - the prophet Tiresius was transformed into a female for seven years - and their power to disrupt and change hegemonic notions of bodily beauty.

For artists/workers like Cassils a moment like the one afforded in the Lady Gaga video is rare. Such a moment could bring national exposure and interest to a young and obviously bright artist. But Cassils is still a working Schmoe, a person who will now only be remembered as that girl who kissed Lady Gaga in a video. While we can go back and forth (endlesly) about whether Lady Gaga is a "good" thing for the mainstream gay rights movement it should comfort us a little - ok a lot - that there are hundreds of creatives like Lady Gaga, dancers, actors, performance artists that are working in their own ways to question oppression and dominant representations of LGBT bodies. Not even one percent of one percent of these folks will get a platform on the scale of Lady Gaga's video. Here's hoping Heather Cassils takes it ... and runs!